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Abstract

Portable paper calendars (i.e., day planners and organizers) have
greatly influenced the design of group electronic calendars. Both
use time units (hours/days/weeks/etc.) to organize visuals, with
useful information (e.g., event types, locations, attendees) usually
presented as - perhaps abbreviated or even hidden - text fields
within those time units. The problem is that, for a group, this
visual sorting of individual events into time buckets conveys only
limited information about the social network of people. For
example, people’s whereabouts cannot be read ‘at a glance’ but
require examining the text. Our goal is to explore an alternate
visualization that can reflect and illustrate group members’
calendar events. Our main idea is to display the group’s calendar
events as spatiotemporal activities occurring over a geographic
space animated over time, all presented on a highly interactive
public display. In particular, our SPALENDAR (SPAtial CALENDAR)
design animates peoples’ past, present and forthcoming
movements between event locations as well as their static
locations. Details of people’s events, their movements and their
locations are progressively revealed and controlled by the
viewer’s proximity to the display, their identity, and their gestural
interactions with it, all of which are tracked by the public display.